Love Make Sharehttp://lovemakeshare.ca
The creative adventures of a ludicrously lucky stepdad and his familyThu, 26 Apr 2018 19:48:19 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.689657475Moleskine vs. Leuchtturm – Notebook Showdownhttp://lovemakeshare.ca/2018/04/11/moleskine-vs-leuchtturm/
http://lovemakeshare.ca/2018/04/11/moleskine-vs-leuchtturm/#commentsWed, 11 Apr 2018 15:00:58 +0000http://lovemakeshare.ca/?p=4287Whistler and I took my long-standing favourite notebook and tested it against a new competitor: Check out the Notebook Showdown, Moleskine vs. Leuchtturm! I’ve been drawing in Moleskines for ages (see here when I used it to design paddles for the girls, here where I updated my bonhommes a while back, or here where I […]

Watch the video for a full breakdown, or keep reading for the highlights.

Moleskine vs. Leuchtturm: The Tests

Test 1: Features

The Leuchtturm, with all the same features of the Moleskine plus perforated pages, the availability of the dot pattern, an index, numbered pages, and an extra bookmark ribbon, took the edge. The Moleskine’s cover has a nicer soft-touch finish, though. Winner: Leuchtturm.

Test 2: Ink Fixing

While ink has a tendency to sit on the creamy pages of the Moleskine a little, the Leuchtturm holds it better and smears less. Using a variety of pens, the Leuchtturm held the ink better every time. Winner: Leuchtturm.

Test 3: Bleed

Somehow, ink is less visible on the reverse of the Leuchtturm’s thinner paper than the Moleskine’s. The effect was dramatic for most everyday-use pens. Winner: Leuchtturm.

Test 4: Erasability

The Moleskine erases much more cleanly and easily, and the Leuchtturm’s pages show pencil marks and impressions far more. Purely for sketching, it’s clear that the Moleskine has the advantage. Winner: Moleskine.

Test 5: Durability

Despite thinner pages, the Leuchtturm’s paper is about as tear-resistant as the Moleskine’s. But when you spill coffee on a Leuchtturm page, it virtually repels the water, whereas the Moleskine’s paper soaks it up like a sponge. It was actually miraculous and surprising how well the Leuchtturm did in this test. Winner: Leuchtturm.

Verdict

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]]>http://lovemakeshare.ca/2018/04/11/moleskine-vs-leuchtturm/feed/24287LEGO Ideas Tron Legacy Reviewhttp://lovemakeshare.ca/2018/04/08/lego-ideas-tron-legacy-review/
http://lovemakeshare.ca/2018/04/08/lego-ideas-tron-legacy-review/#respondSun, 08 Apr 2018 21:25:25 +0000http://lovemakeshare.ca/?p=4280The LEGO Ideas Tron Legacy set is finally here! We got it in as quickly as possible and put it together. Watch the video for full thoughts and lots of shots of the kit and minifigs, but here are some highlights: We didn’t find it to be a particularly challenging build – at 230 pieces […]

Watch the video for full thoughts and lots of shots of the kit and minifigs, but here are some highlights:

We didn’t find it to be a particularly challenging build – at 230 pieces there weren’t many surprises. But it has enough going on that it was a fun and satisfying build.

The duplication of parts in this kit makes it a build that’s well-suited to multiple family members all taking part together.

The colours are absolutely gorgeous. Both the blue and the orange are bright and beautiful.

The printing on the minifigs is excellent. All of them have a ton of tiny details and multiple levels of colour that make the characters pop. Quorra’s ISO tattoo is maybe the highlight of the printing – it’s a subtle bit of the lore of the movie that’s well-executed. Rinzler’s print is a bit busy, given how nondescript his murdered-out all-black costume is in the movie, but it’s cool to see how carefully they picked out all the pieces of his suit.

The lightcycles are clearly meant to be display items, not playthings. If you pull out the bars along the bottom of the bikes, the wheels will roll and they can be played with a little more easily. Kid-tested, kid-approved.

It’s a real shame that Quorra isn’t given a place to stand on the display base. She’s a cool minifig and deserves a place next to Sam and Rinzler, given that she’s one of the leads in the movie. Also she’s the kids’ favourite, to the point that they both dressed up as her one Halloween.

I forgot to mention it specifically in the video but it’s cool to have the heads with different expressions printed on the front and back. It gives a little extra versatility to how the figures are played with and staged for display.

]]>http://lovemakeshare.ca/2018/04/08/lego-ideas-tron-legacy-review/feed/04280Texts from my Daughtershttp://lovemakeshare.ca/2018/03/26/texts-from-my-daughters/
http://lovemakeshare.ca/2018/03/26/texts-from-my-daughters/#respondTue, 27 Mar 2018 02:50:40 +0000http://lovemakeshare.ca/?p=4271We’ve been slowly inching towards the day where the kids start staying home alone from time to time. There are a lot of reasons why they should. They’re old enough and responsible enough. That’s the primary thing. But eventually saving a mortgage payment’s worth of cash on daycare every month – that’s another. Watching them […]

]]>We’ve been slowly inching towards the day where the kids start staying home alone from time to time.

There are a lot of reasons why they should. They’re old enough and responsible enough. That’s the primary thing. But eventually saving a mortgage payment’s worth of cash on daycare every month – that’s another. Watching them grow and self-actualize. Knowing that they’re in their own space, able to do their homework and tend to the pets and take ownership of the home in a cool new way.

But I’ll tell you a secret. The thing I was looking forward to the most wasn’t the personal growth. It wasn’t their settling into our home in a more meaningful way. It wasn’t even the prospect of extra cash.

Nope.

It was the fact that we ordered a phone for the house. A bare-bones Android deal.

One I naturally designed and 3D printed a holder for.

And for the first time, I would be able to text with my girls.

Bananas, right? We were about to take this massive step, and all I could think about was texts from my daughters.

I know people talk a lot of smack about texting. It’s not a high-quality interaction, really. Not the same as talking face to face. Not the same as picking up the phone.

But I love texts. I love language and writing and reading, and I love the warmth you get from that fleeting contact with someone you can’t wait to see again. (I’m not always good at texting people back right away, as time has a bad habit of getting away from me, but I love it nonetheless.)

I spend most of my time away from my girls, when I do the math. During the week, I’m at work. They’re at school. I wait from the time they get on the bus in the morning to the time when I pick them up in the evening to hear from them. On weekends, I don’t always bring them along if I’m running errands. And during those times, before we see each other in person, I miss them. Some days, I miss them a lot. So I jumped at the opportunity to have a phone around that they can use to check in. Altruistically, it gives them security and confidence. Selfishly, it gives me a little boost to get me over the finish line and bring me home with a smile on my face.

After the phone arrived, we trialled it with a quick grocery run. NJ was out and I needed stuff for supper, so the girls locked the door behind me and settled in. They were clearly nervous – well, the littlest was, at any rate – and so I touched base when I got to where I was going.

“Hey girls,” I said. “I’m at the grocery store.”

“OK love you,” came the response.

And right there, everything I wanted from the girls having access to a phone while home alone came though. In an exchange of ten words, I knew their lifeline was working, they knew where I was and what I was doing, I knew they were OK, and we got to send each other that little bloom of warmth you get when a text rolls in from someone you’ve been waiting to hear from.

]]>http://lovemakeshare.ca/2018/03/26/texts-from-my-daughters/feed/04271Productivity Guilthttp://lovemakeshare.ca/2018/03/18/productivity-guilt/
http://lovemakeshare.ca/2018/03/18/productivity-guilt/#commentsMon, 19 Mar 2018 01:36:33 +0000http://lovemakeshare.ca/?p=4264Two holidays in a row, I’ve gone back to work more tired than I left. No matter how productive I’ve been, I can’t shake the feeling that my level of productivity was just way too low. It’s not like I haven’t enjoyed myself. March Break with the kids was excellent. We had some decent weather, […]

]]>Two holidays in a row, I’ve gone back to work more tired than I left. No matter how productive I’ve been, I can’t shake the feeling that my level of productivity was just way too low.

It’s not like I haven’t enjoyed myself. March Break with the kids was excellent. We had some decent weather, one last snow, we got outside and did activities and made art and crafts and watched movies and played games and generally just had a great time.

But this break, in spite of the fact that not only did we enjoy ourselves and do a ton, in spite of the fact that I made several videos for the YouTube channel, I’m feeling listless.

I don’t feel like I did enough.

I don’t mean like I didn’t do enough with the kids. It’s not the usual sort of last-minute second-guess parenting guilt at the end of a holiday. We had a full, varied, and balanced March Break week and I feel good about the time we spent together.

No, this is creative guilt. I had a whole week off. Why wasn’t my 3D printer humming the whole time? Why didn’t I do a whole bunch of work on our PIGRRL Zero build? I have a bunch of 3D modeling and writing and painting and drawing and graphic design to do.

There certainly wasn’t a whole lot of creative time this past week that looked like this.

Where did an entire week go? Where did my productivity go?

The ridiculous thing is that I know where it went. I know exactly where it went. It went into museum visits and sculpting and skiing and sledding and skating and library visits and reading stories and and and and and. It went into a week that was so packed with smiles that Friday had to basically be a rest day, and even that was full.

Ever been skating with a unicorn? It’s pretty great.

It went into being a good dad, I think. At least, I hope so. That was the goal.

It’s hard to be a productive creative type and be an involved, engaged parent and partner at the same time. I don’t always make the balance work. There are times I intend to go down to the shop for fifteen minutes and the kids don’t see me for forty-five. There are definitely nights when I don’t get to bed as early as I want to. There are projects that don’t get seen to for days because I’m too busy with household duties. And there are holidays, like these, where I want to spend as much quality time as possible with the kids but I also also want to work on an endless number of creative projects. And as much as I feel like I need the creative stuff to keep my equilibrium, my kids will always win that tug-of-war.

And so now I’m ten hours from hitting the road to go back to work after a week away, and I feel like I haven’t done anything, despite having done a ton.

I don’t know what the productivity equivalent of perfectionism is, but I’ve got it. No matter how much I do I never seem to have done enough.

If anyone else has figured out having kids and also having a brain that you can’t shut off, let me know how you find the balance.

]]>http://lovemakeshare.ca/2018/03/18/productivity-guilt/feed/242643D Print a DSLR Camera Mounthttp://lovemakeshare.ca/2018/03/16/3d-print-dslr-camera-mount/
http://lovemakeshare.ca/2018/03/16/3d-print-dslr-camera-mount/#respondSat, 17 Mar 2018 03:34:46 +0000http://lovemakeshare.ca/?p=4260We needed a very particular DSLR camera mount for our workbench – so we designed a custom one in Autodesk Fusion 360 and printed it out ourselves! I wish we had this when we were doing the PiGRRL Zero Unboxing video! Would have made shooting it way easier. You can find the STL file for […]

]]>http://lovemakeshare.ca/2018/03/16/3d-print-dslr-camera-mount/feed/04260Seven Things We Learned Making a Video Gamehttp://lovemakeshare.ca/2018/03/09/seven-things-we-learned-making-a-video-game/
http://lovemakeshare.ca/2018/03/09/seven-things-we-learned-making-a-video-game/#commentsSat, 10 Mar 2018 04:11:21 +0000http://lovemakeshare.ca/?p=4236There is no reason, in 2018, not to make a video game. The kids and I made their mom a pretty awesome Christmas present that I haven’t taken the time to tell you about until now. It turns out that it’s a story that’s longer in the making than I realized. Some years back I […]

The kids and I made their mom a pretty awesome Christmas present that I haven’t taken the time to tell you about until now. It turns out that it’s a story that’s longer in the making than I realized.

Some years back I made a bold claim, as I’m known to do from time to time. It was made on this blog, publicly, in an attempt to keep myself honest.

2012 is the year I make a video game… to challenge myself, to put something together in a medium that will tax my writing and artistic abilities, my direction and my ability to create something complete.

But then, totally unexpectedly, five years later, 2017 became the year I made a video game.

The RPG Maker software has been around in various forms for two decades, and innumerable games have been built using its tools. Those who played classic Final Fantasy games and other JRPGs know the style of game well – top-down open-world adventures, starring a party of characters who level up as you progress through the (usually epic) story. Back in October 2017, Humble Bundle sold a bunch of RPG Maker stuff for pennies, and I and nearly 47 000 others picked up one or more versions of the software, some asset packs, and a handful of games. And as we approached the holidays, I had a silly idea. And so I broached it with the kids: What if we made your mama a game?

Pretty much every holiday, as we spend some time with her family, NJ reminisces about how she and her dad would play the original Legend of Zelda on the NES. She has a lot of fond memories of working out the puzzles as her dad controlled the action. It wasn’t a JRPG, exactly, not in the style that RPG Maker lends it to, but it was close. And so the kids and I hunkered down and outlined a short game, which ended up with the title Mama vs. the Monsters.

It was a ridiculous thing, half video-game and half scavenger hunt. She’d have to solve puzzles in the game, follow clues in the real world, and use the solutions and clues in both the real world and the virtual one to beat the game. Monsters had taken over the house, and NJ would have to reassemble the scattered family to defeat the monsters and their boss and save Christmas.

It meant a lot of late nights (both for me and the kids) as we built environments, wrote dialogue and descriptive text, tweaked combat difficulty, and tested the game. But when we finally revealed it, NJ enjoyed solving the puzzles and was struck by how personalized it was. “And,” she said, when I asked her about it for this piece, “honestly, it was nice having a game in this style that I could actually sit down and beat” – the hour-long experience didn’t overstay its welcome. The kids were thrilled to unveil our project, and were so excited they could barely keep from spoiling the puzzles.

And on my end, not only had I seen those three faces light up as they played, but five years since declaring I would I had suddenly actually made a video game. Not dabbled with the tools, not sketched out a design doc – made an honest-to-goodness game, start to finish.

In the interest of our mission here to encourage and promote project-based learning, there were some lessons learned about our project, so instead of just telling the story, we want to leave you with some of the things that worked well for us as we started making our game.

Scope your game small.

This means not just a tight, limited narrative, but keeping the maps relatively small and the combat relatively sparse. By scoping a small project, you can focus on adding density and depth in your limited amount of development time instead of stretching to try and make something expansive. Focusing on density makes the small environments of your small game feel more real and more explorable than a large empty world would. Mama vs. the Monsters had only eight relatively small maps (outside our house, garage, main floor, basement, upstairs hallway, kids’ rooms, and master bedroom), all of which had some interesting stuff going on.

Pictured: Most of the game.

Outline. Know where the game starts, where it will end, and how you get there.

Without planning, getting from one story point to the next is a chore. It’s already not easy to build the logic of your game to get from point A to B. If you’re making up point B on the fly, it’ll be far more difficult to get there. So, in short, outline your game. We wrote a one-page outline that was essentially the objective > puzzle > solution loop, repeated until we got to the end of the game, and it made building the progression of the game much, much easier.

All 476 words of the outline we wrote for our game – the set-up and resolution of each puzzle.

Don’t be afraid to go a little bit off-book.

A couple of our favourite moments and jokes in the game came from riffing in the writing as we were building the game. We never deviated from our outline, but we improvised big chunks of the actual script as we went along. Just because things were outlined in a bare-bones way didn’t mean we couldn’t fill in those outlines with colour and texture!

It’s okay to use stock assets while you’re learning.

Colour and texture doesn’t mean that you have to create it all from scratch. We used the standard, built-in graphics and sound for RPG Maker when we built Mama vs. The Monsters. The point was the process of building the game and crafting an experience for the player. Your next project can be a masterpiece – your first just needs to teach you the ropes.

Bug testing is never enough. Be afraid of bugs. Sometimes, they end up being terrible.

In spite of countless playtests, we still managed to miss things in our game. There was a Christmas morning re-upload of the game files to fix things, including a game-breaking bit of bugginess that would have kept us from completing the puzzle.

Also: don’t be afraid of bugs. Bugs are teachers, and sometimes they’re not bugs at all.

Until you ship your game, bugs are good. Fixing bugs is an excellent way to learn the ins and outs of whatever system you’re using. I certainly know way more about RPG Maker now than when we started, and I’d venture that most of the fine-detail learning I did was in the back half of bug testing – not during development.

But sometimes, to paraphrase Bob Ross, a bug isn’t a bug – it’s just a happy little accident. In our game, when the player enters the house, we have our dog Leo running around, greeting you and following you around. At one point we accidentally set his speed and the randomness of his running around way higher than it should have been – and it totally worked! It looked exactly like his approach and behaviour when we come home after hours away. It was a total goof, and we laughed so hard we had to take a break. It’s still one of my favourite parts of the game, and one of my favourite memories from development.

It’s okay to be personal.

The thing that propelled us – other than a Christmas Eve deadline – was the fact that we had a solid, intrinsic reason for building our game. We weren’t trying to build something for market, we weren’t looking at what’s hot on Twitch, we weren’t looking at anything happening on rpgmaker.net. We just wanted to make someone smile, and to make ourselves smile too. That’s it. And we nailed it.

When you start to develop your first game, just do your thing. Do the thing that feels good for you, and ignore the rest. Because if you get this first thing done – complete a game that means something to you – it won’t just be a finished project, it’ll be a victory.

]]>http://lovemakeshare.ca/2018/03/07/we-build-a-lightbox-for-drawing-and-tracing-from-scraps/feed/04240We Unbox an Adafruit PiGRRL Zero Parts Kit!http://lovemakeshare.ca/2017/12/01/unbox-adafruit-pigrrl-zero-parts-kit/
http://lovemakeshare.ca/2017/12/01/unbox-adafruit-pigrrl-zero-parts-kit/#commentsFri, 01 Dec 2017 17:23:33 +0000http://lovemakeshare.ca/?p=4224We’re getting into electronics! When the Raspberry Pi Zero W came out, the kids and I tried to set up a Raspberry Pi to play games. As a console attached to the TV it never quite worked the way we wanted. The kids like the idea of the Game Boy Advance I’ve got kicking around […]

When the Raspberry Pi Zero W came out, the kids and I tried to set up a Raspberry Pi to play games. As a console attached to the TV it never quite worked the way we wanted. The kids like the idea of the Game Boy Advance I’ve got kicking around the house, but there aren’t a lot of games for it that strike their fancy. So instead, we’re going to build our own handheld!

We ordered the PiGRRL Zero parts kit from Adafruit, plus a couple of other cool bits. They showed up in no time! Last night we had the pleasure of unboxing it and seeing what came with it:

]]>http://lovemakeshare.ca/2017/12/01/unbox-adafruit-pigrrl-zero-parts-kit/feed/24224An Argument With My Daughter, Paraphrasedhttp://lovemakeshare.ca/2017/06/16/argument-daughter-paraphrased/
http://lovemakeshare.ca/2017/06/16/argument-daughter-paraphrased/#commentsSat, 17 Jun 2017 02:54:27 +0000http://lovemakeshare.ca/?p=4215It is about ninety seconds before the children need to be out the door to go to school. I find myself in conversation with my eldest. “Where’s the item that you take to school every single day?” I ask. “In the room that’s a mess because of my sister and I and the animals,” she […]

“Listen,” I say, my own voice rising. “You’re yelling about your thing, which is bugging me so much right now that I can’t even focus on the thing that you’re actually mad about. And this morning my parenting capacity is somewhere between I-don’t-wanna and remedial class, so take the thing and go out the door.”

She does, and I say my usual little affirmations as they walk away, but I know everybody feels like trash.

***

It is about thirty seconds after the kids see me when I come to pick them up.

“Hey Pepper,” says my littlest.

“Hey kiddo,” I say.

Eldest is silent, a little apprehensive as she turns and looks at me.

I hold up a thing – not the thing we argued about, but another thing that she forgot in the heat of our argument. A peace offering, and she knows it. She brightens.

“Hey Pepper,” she says. She grabs something and gives me a hug. “This is for you.”

She has her own olive branch. It’s an early Father’s Day card. It says Thank you for being there for me.

The reason I wanted her to bring the thing happens like twelve seconds later. And we know. We share a look. But by that point, we’re back onside, and reasons and things have stopped mattering quite so much as they did this morning.

]]>http://lovemakeshare.ca/2017/06/16/argument-daughter-paraphrased/feed/24215DadLabs Sent Us A Gift!http://lovemakeshare.ca/2017/04/26/dadlabs-sent-us-gift/
http://lovemakeshare.ca/2017/04/26/dadlabs-sent-us-gift/#respondThu, 27 Apr 2017 02:32:58 +0000http://lovemakeshare.ca/?p=4200Nick, #cretindaddy over at DadLabs, sent us something in the mail. What could it be? SOMETHING FANTASTIC IS WHAT. Follow DadLabs! https://dadlabs.com/ https://www.instagram.com/dadlabs/ https://twitter.com/dadlabs https://www.youtube.com/user/DadLabs https://www.facebook.com/thedadlabs/